President Obama is crowing about enrolling 8 million Americans in ObamaCare. The number seems to have no relation to reality. Nobody is enrolled until they have paid.

In Georgia, insurers received more than 220,000 applications for health coverage in the Affordable Care Act’s exchange as of the official deadline of March 31, according to state officials. The Insurance Commissioner, Ralph Hudgens says that premiums have been received for only 107,581 of those policies which cover 149,465 people. Half.

In California open enrollment is closed, many of the newly insured are finding they cannot find doctors, landing them in a state described as “medical homelessness.” One of the major claims was that ObamaCare would reduce the use of emergency rooms by the uninsured. Uh huh.

Kaiser says it will only get worse. Aging baby boomers increasingly need more care. The growing medical needs of that group are creating a huge burden for the existing health care workforce. The retirement of many doctors in the boomer cohort is compounding the problem. The federal government estimates the physician supply will increase by 7 percent in the next 10 years. The number of Americans over 65 will grow by about 36 percent. Medical students are avoiding primary care and are choosing specialties instead. 20 percent of Americans live in areas with an insufficient number of primary care physicians, 16 percent in areas with too few dentists and 30 percent in areas with a lack of mental health providers.

Well why can’t we have single-payer health care like, say, Sweden? Sweden is always raised as a rare example of a socialist country that works. But a closer look at its health care system tells a different story. Universal public health care means the average Swede with ‘high risk’ prostate cancer has to wait 220 days for treatment. The overall quality of their universal public health consistently ranks among the very best. That quality can be achieved by regulating treatments to follow specific diagnoses as well as standardizing procedures.

But Sweden’s problem is access to care. According to the Euro Health Consumer Index 2013, the average wait time from referral to start of treatment for ‘intermediary and high risk ‘ prostate cancer is 220 days. For lung cancer the wait between an appointment with a specialist and a decision about treatment is 37 days.

The waiting is what economists call “rationing,”— the delay or even failure to provide care due to government budgeting decisions. The number of people seeking care far outweighs the capabilities of providers— insurance in name but not in practice. This is the inevitable result of ObamaCare as well. That’s why there is the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) who will decide what the federal government will pay for.

Stories of people in Sweden suffering stroke, heart failure and other serious medical conditions who were denied or unable to receive urgent care are frequently reported in the Swedish media. Recent examples include a one-month-old infant with cerebral hemorrhage for whom no ambulance was available, and an 80-year-old woman with suspected stroke who had to wait four hours for an ambulance. It’s the same deal in Britain’s NHS, which is so admired by the ObamaCare designers.

Here at home, a New York woman suffering from a neurological disease that has required four brain surgeries has been dropped by all of her doctors and denied medications because of her ObamaCare plan. Margaret Figueroa, 49, suffers from a disease that has her vomiting, she has lost 22 pounds and the pain is unbearable. The ObamaCare plan she purchased assured her that she was covered, but when she went to fill her prescriptions, her insurance card was denied. She cannot find a doctor who will see her. Her congressman,Rep Michael Grimm (R-NY) has intervened to help her obtain vital prescriptions. Grimm says he’s already received calls from at least a dozen Staten Island residents facing the same problem with ObamaCare’s “narrow networks”— extreme restrictions on doctor and hospital access imposed by ObamaCare.

The top cancer centers across the country are not available to those on ObamaCare. 38 percent of all ObamaCare plans only allow patients to pick from just 30% of the largest 20 hospitals in their area. The narrow network horror stories will only continue to grow, and the effects will be disastrous. But Obama is crowing about enrolling 8 million people.